Use of computing devices is becoming more ubiquitous by the day. Computing devices range from standard desktop computers to wearable computing technology and beyond. One area of computing devices that has grown in recent years is in the context of image rendering, such as rendering of games, video streams, etc., which typically rely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to render graphics from a computing device to a display device based on rendering instructions received from the computing device. Image rendering for these purposes can be extremely resource intensive, and available system resources often limit performance of the rendering. Thus, tools for indicating resource usage as a result of image rendering can be useful for developers to determine areas of high resource utilization and possibly implement more efficient instructions, parameters, etc. to improve application performance and user experience.
Some tools for this purpose cause the GPU to tint textures according to Mip level, allowing a developer to visually inspect resource usage based on the tinting, which requires additional resource usage to execute the shader and user interaction to view and recall a tint associated with levels of resource usage. Other tools add shader instrumentation to track resource usage, which can also require additional resources and add implementation complexity.